Automatically “Get Next” is a common feature in business process, IBM Case Manager (ICM) as an application which can conveniently unites content, process and people, certainly it has this feature to provide flexible process controls, this blog entry will show you how “Get Next” works in ICM 5.2 and how to customize it to get next without showing the work items list.

Difference between ICM 5.1.1 and ICM 5.2

Assume you open a work item which is not the first one in In-basket, in ICM 5.1.1, after all the following work item has been processed, it can go back to the first one to process the rest; But from ICM 5.2, if a case worker doesn’t choose the first one to start, we think he doesn’t want to process the first one, so “Get Next” won’t go back to work items which are above the one just he opened. This means in ICM 5.2, “Get Next” will only handle the work items which are sequenced following the one you opened, after all done, even there are still some work items in In-basket (which above the one you opened), it will pop up a dialog says no more work items to deal with.

Enable Get Next feature in ICM 5.2

By default, get next feature is not enabled; this means when you complete a current work item, it will automatically close the work detail page. There are two ways to enable get next by the following steps:

1. Open Work Details page in Page Designer.

2. Open Edit Setting window of work item toolbar, switch to Toolbars tab.

3. The first way is to double click to edit “Complete” button, you should be able to see the selection “Automatically get the next work item”. If you select it, every time a case worker clicks Complete button in Work Detail page during runtime, it will automatically retrieve the next work item until all the following work items in In-basket has been processed.

4. Another way is to add a separate “Open Next Work Item” action.

In this way, it will add a check box with label “Get Next” to work item toolbar. If you mark “Automatically get the next work item” when adding this action, the checkbox will be selected by default, and vice versa.

The second way is suggested since it more intuition, and you can decide whether to get next in runtime, not to speak this setting can overwrite the setting in “Complete” button.

Other notable features about Get Next

1. Get Next won’t deal with locked work item which is locked by other users, but if the next work item is locked by current user himself, it will directly open the work item in edit mode.

2. Get Next will always open the next work item in current work detail page, even the next work item is from different task type with different work detail page.

Customize Get Next feature to support the push-only mode

By default, you will see all the work item list and can choose anyone to process, but under some circumstance, user is expected not to see the whole list, every time he login the application, there is only one work item displays and he can only process by sequence. This is push-only mode, like custom service in bank or insurance company. Customer supporters are not expected to choose a favorite custom to service; they just service for any custom the system push to them.

To achieve this, first, we need to hidden In-basket, which can be easily done by hidden default Work page.

Open target solution, switch to Roles tab, click to open target role, then on Pages tab, remove Work page.

Second, we need to customize the Work Detail page to retrieve the first work item when work details page loaded. This can be done by the following steps:

1. Open Work Details page in Page Designer.
2. Add a Script Adapter widget to page then click the little black triangle on the top right, select Hide Widget to hide it. Open hidden area, you can see the hidden widget you just added. There is another default Script Adatper1 by default, ignore it since we won’t use it.

3. Click the Edit Settings icon on the Script Adapter widget and insert the script below into the JavaScript text area.

When opening the link, it looks like the picture as below. No Work page and In-basket shown, and directly displays a work item.

Select Get Next checkbox and process the work item, it will automatically push next work item, when all done, the dialog “There are no more work items to be processed in this in-basket or the work item that you handled is at the end of this in-basket.” displays.

Summary

This blog entry introduces Get Next feature in ICM 5.2 and give an example on how to customize it to push only mode, hope this can give you as a reference when you using this feature.

With IBM Case Manager 5.2, you can customize the style of the in-basket by building a custom in-basket widget, starting with the standard one, and adding a custom column decorator. Developers can override the getColumnDecorator() function on icm/pgwidget/inbasket/Inbasket class, which returns an object with a column id to the decorator function pairs.

The following sample will highlight the property name “flo” by its value range.

Yi Duan is an ECM Advisory Software Engineer in IBM Software Group, China. He has over 11 years of experience in software engineering. Yi joined IBM Content Navigator Quality Assurance team since its first release in 2011. He has extensive experience with IBM Content Navigator, especially in EDS. Prior to that, Yi worked in IBM Document Manager team for 6 years. Yi holds a Master degree in Computer Science from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

IBM Content Navigator has an extensible and pluggable framework that is based on the tier architecture and the usage of open standards such as JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Java. It has powerful expandability. For a quick overview of the various options and framework, check out ONE UI - IBM Content Navigator as an application framework.

External data services (EDS)

EDS is an interface that IBM Content Navigator provides to access data from separate data sources. With EDS implementation, it is very easy for you to control the property dada and customize the behavior of the property. EDS is powerful. But in many scenarios, such as change properties order in the add dialog, you should implement request and response filter instead of using EDS.

Request and response filters

The request and response filters are parts of IBM Content Navigator extension points. In some instances, you might want to modify requests and responses so that you can modify the data that is being sent to or returned from the service. To accomplish this, you can create a plug-in to filter a request that is made to a service or to filter a response that is received from a service. EDS is a plug-in in IBM Content Navigator that is implemented by request and response filters. Often time, you would want to implement your own request and response filters. Other time, EDS can simplify your implementation.

When to use EDS and when to implement request and response filters?

Use EDS if you want to do some of the following tasks. Otherwise you probably need to implement a request or response filter:

Prefilling properties with values

Looking up the choice list values for a property or dependent property

Setting minimum, maximum values and length

Setting formats for properties

Setting property status, such as read-only, required or hidden

Implementing property validation and error checking

Where to use EDS?

According to the EDS implemented request and response filters, the following actions in IBM Content Navigator can be implemented:

Adding documents and folders

Checking documents in to the repository

Editing properties for one or multiple items

Editing item properties in the viewer

Using entry templates

Setting workflow step properties and workflow filter criteria fields

Creating or using searches

Controlling IBM Content Manager OnDemand search folders

If you want it in other actions, you probably need to implement a custom request or response filter.

For more information on EDS, response and request filters, check out the corresponding chapter in the new IBM Redbooks publication on IBM Content Navigator. In the book, we provide multiple examples of how to do these.

Tomas Barinais an ECM Consultant with IBM Software Group in Czech Republic. He has more than 10 years of experience in content management field. For the last eight years, Tomas focuses primarily on design and delivery of FileNet based solutions. His areas of expertise include solution design, ECM, and mobile development. Tomas holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Czech Technical University.

IBM Content Navigator (ICN) has become the main UI of IBM ECM product and solution portfolio and increasingly, larger number of products and custom applications are adopting its unified framework for UI development. ECM solutions are now becoming unified by its look and behavior. But can your solution handle mobile platform? Are people asking you about mobile support for your ECM solutions? Do you want to extend your ECM solution to mobile users yet you are not sure about options you have? You come to the right place. I will try to answer some of your questions.

Mobile development options

You probably have heard about the native client for iOS that you can download from AppStore and use with ICN. This client allows you to quickly provide core ECM functionality to your users. However, it is obvious you cannot customize the UI appearance with it. But don’t forget, it still uses ICN backend, so you can modify the data that the client consumes or produces by using request/response filters or you can add your own mobile features where you can open your custom applications directly from within the client. And why not use UI developed in ICN framework?

Have you noticed how many websites are multi-channel these days, meaning adapting to the client and resolution the visitors use? When developing your ICN plugins, keep multi-channel in mind and decide about data representation directly for the device or to optimize your layout on the fly.

Or you can just start using Dojo Mobile with ICN JavaScript Model API and prepare special application just for your mobile platform. But guess what? You don’t need to start from scratch. ICN ships with IBM Worklight sample that you can customize for your needs. You will be surprised how many features are already there and how comprehensive it is!

IBM Worklight sample

What exactly is this IBM Worklight? IBM Worklight helps you extend your business to mobile devices. It’s an IDE, and it’s also a runtime framework you can use for your mobile applications development.

For ICN sample that ships with ICN, however, you do not need any additional runtime infrastructure. Running ICN server is enough.

Figure 1- Sample UI

You can pack the sample as a hybrid application that can be deployed directly to mobile device. In this case you would use Apache Cordova library as native shell for your web application. This allows you to access native device API using JavaScript.

Another option is to pack the whole sample as an ICN plugin. Then you don’t have to install anything on the device. Of course, you will not be able to access native device APIs.

Sample customization

Ok, that’s fine. So now how to start? With so many frameworks and technologies, wouldn’t it be difficult to get going? Not at all. Let’s take a look at the architecture of the sample. It uses ICN JavaScript Model API you might be familiar with from standard web development and just adds Dojo Mobile with MVC pattern.

Figure 2-Sample architecture

In the IBM Content Navigator Redbooks publication, we provide a guided tour showing how to add a new work feature to this sample and how to display a list of work items and their parameters. There’s a chapter there that helps you understand how the sample works and how to customize it for your specific needs.

Take a look at our video (coming soon) that demonstrates the customized sample and check out the IBM Redbooks publication for more details.